Time per lecture?

[jonpalnile]

Hey guys, could you estimate the average time spent studying per lecture? I know this varies a lot by block, subject, previous experience, etc. So if you could include a few of those things that would be awesome. An example would be:

"Concurrently taking anatomy, physiology, cell bio, and bio Chem. Each lecture everyday x 5 days/wk.

Bio Chem: 1.5 hours (pre-read notes and Lippincott's) 30 min (watch lecture on 2x), 40 minutes (re-read ppt twice which takes 20 mins each time). Done

If you could do this for a few m1 classes Id really appreciate it. I'm just trying to get an idea of how many hours people put in per lecture.

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[Azete]

Your estimation is pretty good for all the science courses. The BS stuff like ethics you can obviously just cram the night before.

Put it this way, there's about 20 hours of science lectures per week. Every hour of lecture requires between 1-3 hours (depending on difficulty) of additional outside class time to fully understand. So, if you attend lecture and watch in real time, anywhere between 40-80 hours per week. As you cut corners and learn to be more efficient, you can shift the range down to 30-60 hours per week. The real issue is that the night before exams you're not typically going to end up studying anything but that exam's material, but you still have lectures that day and the day of the exam. So, essentially, you miss a day of studying but you still have to make it up -- same work but less days to do it.

 

[jonpalnile]

That's good to know. So 1 hr lecture + ~2 hrs = 3 hours on average spent per lecture. 3*20=~60 hours studying per week. Does that include labs?

 

[Azete]

That's good to know. So 1 hr lecture + ~2 hrs = 3 hours on average spent per lecture. 3*20=~60 hours studying per week. Does that include labs?

That includes labs, they're usually 2 hours so you just count them as 2 lectures. Even the most dense anatomy labs didn't take me more than 4 hours per lab outside of class, but some people really struggled with it and it was pretty common to find students in the cadaver lab at 2am -- everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. For example Genetics stuff would routinely take me 3 hours per lecture, but Biochem I might spend 20 minutes.